My wrists smell of violet and sandalwood, with a hint of raspberry. The perfume is pleasant and I wouldnât be surprised to be accosted with it at a department store. But Iâm not at a perfumery, Iâm at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and this perfume wasnât carefully formulated by an expert perfumer â it was designed by artificial intelligence.
AI is now designing everything from perfume to pizza to artwork. The particular portfolio Iâm visiting is part of a project called How to Generate (Almost) Anything, in which machines and humans are teaming up to design strange and creative new takes on familiar things.
Each design starts with a dataset, essentially a collection of thousands of images, texts, or recipes. After analysing the datasets, the algorithm learns the structure and patterns of whatever it has been fed, and spits back out new designs with their own strange twists. Some then get turned into reality.
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AI-designed chocolate truffles with beetroot and cranberries were fairly tasty, if slightly vegetal, but the gingersnap and beef version that team member Anna Waldman-Brown made for an earlier test sounded less good. George Sun, another team member, describes them unconvincingly as âactually not too badâ. Luckily none were left by the time I arrived.
However, not all the designs were successful. One of the truffle recipes called for 1,116 bags of chai, so Iâd say it hasnât quite mastered chocolatiering yet. âItâs just a bunch of leaves at that point,â says Sun.
When the AI designed vintage dresses, they mostly turned out relatively tame â the dress I saw was a pink, frilly number that would fit in at a prom in the 80s â but the accessories werenât quite right. Several of the designs came with long hats that look like diving boards, which team leader Pinar Delul says is probably because the algorithm couldnât distinguish between the dress pictures it was trained on and the written captions on those images.
The team believe that the process works best with human collaboration. An algorithm spits out hundreds or thousands of ideas, and a person then goes through them to weed out the ones that donât make sense or to alter those that seem impossible.
Aside from simply being fun, projects like this show how far we are from artificial general intelligence â AIs that can perform any task that a human can. If AI canât yet figure out that chocolate truffles shouldnât have beef in them, or that a metre-wide hat is inconvenient, machines as intelligent as humans are not coming any time soon.
Delul hopes that the project will inspire people to make more creative choices, as the AI-designed outfits inspired her to revisit a childhood love of fashion design. âThere are some things that I wouldnât have thought to create if it wasnât for AI,â she says. âWe are trying to show that in any category, in any topic that you can think of, you can actually benefit from AI.â
